put on what she considered a sensible dress, and her grandmother’s pearl drop earrings, and drove into town to visit her lawyer.
His name was Dirk MacIntosh, a nice Scottish name that made her trust him. He had been a friend of Mortimer’s and he’d done all their legal work. He was older now, of course, and limited himself to working in his office only three days a week.
“Come in, come in,” he greeted Eleanor as she waited in the firm’s reception area.
He held the door open for her. Once inside, he indicated a leather club chair facing his desk. “So good to see you Eleanor.”
“So good to see you,” she told him, and it was. It was comforting to see that his thick red hair was now white and his white eyebrows had thickened into a Groucho Marx joke. He’d put on quite a bit of weight. Well, hadn’t they all? “How is your family?”
They chatted amiably for a while, as if this was a social visit. Then Dirk said, “Eleanor. What can I do for you?”
“I want to revise my will,” Eleanor said.
* * *
—
Eleanor arrived back home in the early afternoon, hugging her secret to herself like a present. She’d had lunch in town with Silas and argued about whether science fiction movies were harbingers of things to come or just plain silly. After lunch, she’d walked with him to Fair Street, and down the narrow, one-lane street to his house. They strolled around the outside of his house and the outside of the house next door. The good news for Eleanor was that there weren’t too many trees. She was worried about feeling hemmed in, claustrophobic, after having such a wide-open view for so many years of her life. She could imagine, because Silas told her it was how he felt, that she might feel safe in this neighborhood, near neighbors and a short walk to the library, so that as she grew older, and less mobile—although, Silas insisted, that wouldn’t happen for years and years—it would be less of a problem to buy groceries and medicine and such.
“You know,” Silas told her, “when you borrow books from the library, the volunteers will bring them to you if you request it. Think how guilty you’d feel if they had to drive all the way out to your house on the cliff, especially on a stormy day.”
Eleanor nodded, busy thinking.
“You’ll miss seeing the ocean, though,” Silas said. “No going around that.”
“True,” Eleanor replied. “But look at the yard. They’ve planted dozens of blue hydrangea. I could add blue cornflowers and delphinium and iris for the spring, and larkspur and of course periwinkle low in the bed…Look at their back porch! Morning glories are absolutely covering the latticework. Silas, I think I’ll have enough blue.”
* * *
—
After Silas walked Eleanor back to her car, she drove home full of excitement and not a little anxiety. Change was hard for everyone, but vast change was terrifying.
A strange car was in her driveway.
Phillip was leaning against it, his arms crossed in front of his chest.
Eleanor parked on the curb. She certainly didn’t want to block him in. She took her time gathering her purse, emotionally preparing herself for the oncoming battle.
The problem was that she’d always cared for her son-in-law. She’d admired him for staying with Alicia, who could be, and no one knew this better than Eleanor, demanding.
When Alicia and Phillip were young, with their new baby daughter, in a new home with new neighbors, Eleanor spent weeks with them, helping take care of Arianna—she was Arianna back then and for years afterward, before she insisted on shortening her name. Phillip was doing surgery at Mass General, and he came home tired but ecstatic. Phillip would stride into the house, searching out his wife, and sometimes he was so ebullient he would pick Alicia up and spin her around.
“I saved someone’s life today!” he’d say.
“Tell me everything!” Alicia would reply.
Eleanor would sit in the corner, holding Arianna, while Phillip described the surgery, telling her about the patient and the family. Alicia would gaze at him as if he were a hero, which, in a way, he was.
When did that change? Why? By the time Arianna was three, Phillip was busier with paperwork and Alicia was no longer thrilled by Phillip’s successes. They were expected. Arianna was in a neighborhood playgroup, and Alicia spent time with the other mothers, who were gossipy and fun and wanted to take clothes